Google Adding New Spam Warnings In Webmaster Tools

Google is sending new warnings to webmasters when it suspects the sites may have spam-related problems that need to be addressed.

Over at Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz points to two new warnings that users have discovered in their Webmaster Tools accounts: a “notice of detected unnatural links” and a separate warning about cloaking.

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmas…er=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

We detected cloaking on your site and suspect this is the cause. For example at http://forums.bfenthusiasts.com/ we found:

For more information about what cloaking is, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmas…er=66355&hl=en.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from bfenthusiasts.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp…-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/to…deration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

Note: if you have an account in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can verify the authenticity of this message by logging into https://www.google.com/webmasters/to…overview?hl=en and going to the Message Center.

Google has talked for some time now about wanting to increase its outreach to webmasters like this. In a webmaster video taped last month (with our Danny Sullivan on set), Google’s Matt Cutts talked about Google’s plans to make wemaster communication a priority in 2011.

About The Author

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.